Tabula Rasa

Truffaut’s “The Wild Child”

François Truffaut’s “The Wild Child,” from 1969, screening at Film Forum through Nov. 13, is a film about the simultaneous birth of consciousness and the extinction of spontaneity. Written by Truffaut and Jean Gruault, the movie is based on a true story: in 1798, a mute boy (the non-actor Jean-Pierre Cargol), naked, mud-caked, and walking on all fours, was found in the woods near Toulouse and given over to the care of a young doctor named Jean Itard (played by Truffaut). Itard, a child of both the Enlightenment and the Revolution, dresses the boy properly, teaches him to use tools, and tries to awaken his soul to morality and affection. The drama, based on Itard’s fictionalized account of the events, lies in the doctor’s spiritual journey; it takes us a while to realize that Itard, a scientist experimenting on a human being, is almost as strange as his subject. Nestor Almendros shot the movie in ravishing black-and-white and observes a Chardin-like reverence for such essential items of civilization as dishes, keys, and quill pens. ♦

David Denby has been a staff writer and film critic at The New Yorker since 1998.